SYPHILIS

Syphilis is a still more terrible venereal disease. It usually appears
first in small, hard sores, hard chancres, on the sexual parts or the
mouth. Then the syphilitic poison spreads throughout the whole body by
means of the blood. After a few weeks it breaks out on the face or
body. Its final cure is always questionable. Syphilis may lie dormant
for years, and then suddenly become active again. It breaks out in
sores on all parts of the body, often eats up the bone, destroys
internal organs, such as the liver, causes hardening of the lungs,
diseases of the blood vessels and eye diseases. Ulcers of the brain
and nerve paralysis often result from it. One of its most terrible
consequences is consumption of the spinal marrow and paralysis of the
brain, or paresis. The first slowly hardens and destroys the spinal
marrow, the second the brain. These diseases are only developed by
previous syphilitics. As a rule they occur from 5 to 20 years after
infection, usually 10 or 15 years after it. And they usually happen to
persons who believed themselves completely cured. Consumption of the
spinal marrow leads to death in the course of a few years of continual
torture. Paralysis of the brain turns the sufferer into a human ruin,
gradually extinguishing all mental and nervous functions, sentience,
movement, speech and intellect.

One danger of syphilis is the fact that its true nature may be
overlooked during the first period, because of the lack of pronounced
symptoms. Its early sores may easily be mistaken for some skin
affection. Mercury and other means are successful in doing away with
at least the more noticeable signs of syphilis during the first and
secondary stages. The modern medical treatment using mercury and
Salvarsan (606) in alternation, has been very successful. It is
claimed that by following it, syphilis may be totally cured if taken
in hand during the first stage. The sores developed during the first
two or three years of the disease are very infectious. In the case of
a chronic syphilis of three or four years' standing, the sores as a
rule are no longer infectious. It is possible, however, for a
syphilitic of this description to bring forth syphilitic children,
_without infecting his wife_. Such children either die at birth, or
later, of this congenital syphilis. They may also die of spinal
consumption or paresis between the ages of 10 and 20. The mortality of
all syphilitic chi